"They say the earth never forgets its debts, but I never knew that I was the price.
I stood in the heart of that dark pit, my pickaxe striking the dirt as if searching for my own fate. My four cousins stood around me, their ragged breath filling the void, but my heart whispered something else... it whispered that beneath this soil, a monster had been waiting for millennia to wake.
'I found it!' Mansour cried out.
In that instant, my chest tightened. When I saw that piece of mysterious, dark carnelian, I didn't see a treasure; I saw a 'snare' carefully laid for us. The characters engraved upon it weren't just ancient Musnad script—they were a living pulse, letters writhing like serpents, a forbidden tongue that no human eye was meant to behold.
I reached out. It wasn't greed; it was a sense of belonging, as if the artifact was calling to me: 'Return... return, you who carries my blood.'
The moment my fingertips brushed that cold surface, a bolt of ice pierced my soul. Time ceased to be a river flowing forward; it became a vortex that swallowed me whole. I saw my cousins' faces distort, their screams becoming distant echoes in a bottomless well, as if they were being erased from the very records of existence.
Then... there was only the void.
I opened my eyes, but the vision was not entirely mine. The sun above was blindingly painful, and the thick scent of frankincense filled my lungs—a strange aroma I had only known in ancient tales. I was no longer in that damp pit. I stood in the middle of a colossal marble plaza, its pillars embracing the clouds like giants guarding history itself.
I looked at my hand, and my soul shuddered. Just beneath the skin, black threads like shadows were crawling slowly from my wrist, wrapping around my arm like a tattoo of cold fire. It wasn't just a mark; I could feel it devouring my 'identity.' Attiya—the young man who, minutes ago, dreamed of wealth—was fading, replaced by something else... something ancient, and dark.
'Damn it...' I muttered in a voice I didn't recognize, a voice with the resonance of kings who refused to be forgotten.
I looked around. All eyes were fixed on me—people dressed in linen and silk, their faces masked with dread. Was I a savior? Or was I merely a sacrifice returned to the altar after three thousand years of absence?
As I struggled to grasp my surroundings, a sharp migraine tore through my skull, as if someone else's memories were trying to uproot mine and plant themselves in their place. It wasn't just a curse; it was an invasion of my soul.
'Look! The black tattoo... the mark of the Forbidden Lineage!'
The voice came sharp as a blade. I lifted my head with difficulty to see an old man in a long white robe embroidered with gold thread, clutching a staff topped with a bronze ibex head. His eyes widened in horror as he stared at my wrist, where the black threads tightened like a python strangling its prey.
I tried to speak. I wanted to ask about my cousins—about Naji, about Hameed—but my throat betrayed me. My voice came out foreign, deep, as if rising from the depths of an abandoned well:
'Where... am I?'
The old man recoiled and struck the marble floor violently with his staff, summoning guards clad in bronze armor and curved swords.
'You stand in the presence of the Temple of Awwam, O you who came from nothingness. No one bears this mark and lives... unless he is the "Cursed Offering" foretold by the priests!'
In that moment, the heat of the tattoo intensified. The darkness began to crawl toward my neck, and with every millimeter it gained, I heard my cousins' screams echoing in my mind. They hadn't disappeared... I could feel them! It was as if their souls were suspended in a limbo between my time and theirs.
Attiya... save us...
Naji's voice reached me, a faint, drowning whisper.
I grit my teeth until they nearly shattered. I looked at the guards closing in. In my world, I was just a youth looking for a treasure to change his life. But here... I was an outcast entity, carrying within my body a curse that could topple thrones.
Suddenly, my cursed hand moved on its own. I didn't choose it, but the darkness enveloping my wrist emitted a cold smoke, and I felt a brutal power surging through my veins.
'Stay back...' I said, this time in a commanding tone. It wasn't my dialect; the Musnad language flowed from my tongue with terrifying fluency.
The priest turned pale, his staff slipping from his hand.
'He speaks the tongue of the First Kings... a language not heard since the fall of the first Great Dam!'
I didn't resist when the guards rushed me. Not out of weakness, but because the curse running through my veins was siphoning my energy, leaving my body hollow like a dry husk. I felt the cold bronze shackles tighten around my blackened wrist. The priest looked at me with a gaze that mixed reverence with disgust, as if I were a sacred corpse.
'To the Great Palace... to the throne of Shammar Yuhar'ish!' the priest shouted, the name itself seeming to shake the earth.
They dragged me through the streets of Marib, which teemed with life. I saw the markets and heard the vendors, but my eyes were fixed on one thing: my cousins. I couldn't see them, but I could hear their moans beneath my skin. Each time the black tattoo crawled, I felt their souls being crushed within it. My body had become their prison, and the curse was our jailer.
When the doors of the Great Palace swung open, the scent of blood mixed with musk hit me. At the end of the towering hall, he sat.
The King.
He was a man radiating majesty, seated upon a throne carved from elephant ivory and inlaid with pure gold. His eyes were like a hawk's, piercing my chest to search for the secret of the darkness that shrouded me.
'Is this the "Offering" the prophecies speak of?' the King said, his deep voice shaking the walls. 'A mere wretched boy in tattered rags?'
The guards forced me to kneel at the foot of the throne, but I didn't. In my world, I knelt for no one, and here... the curse refused to bow.
'Kneel!' a guard barked, striking my back with the butt of his spear. But in that moment, the headache exploded in my brain again. I saw a flash of the past... I saw this very King plunging a dagger into the heart of an ancient queen. I saw the betrayal that gave birth to this curse.
The curse wasn't just magic; it was 'deferred vengeance.'
'You...' I whispered, and my voice now was not my own—it was a collective voice, as if thousands of the dead were speaking through me. 'You are the one who stole the sun and covered it in blood.'
The King's expression shifted. He drew his ruby-encrusted sword and advanced toward me in a rage: 'I shall rip that cursed tongue from your throat!'
As he raised his sword to strike my neck, the unthinkable happened. The black tattoo on my wrist exploded like ink in water. The bronze shackles shattered like dry paper.
I was not the one controlling my body. I felt my right hand lunge with the speed of lightning, outstripping his blade. My fingers—which had turned into claws of black shadow—plunged directly into his chest.
A deadly silence fell over the hall.
The King froze, his eyes bulging in shock. No red blood spilled; instead, his body began to erode, turning into black ash that was absorbed by the tattoo on my hand. He screamed without a sound while I felt his power, his memories, and his tyranny flowing into me.
'The throne has returned to its true master...' the voice whispered in my mind.
The King's body fell, hollow as a worn-out garment. I looked at my hand; the tattoo had now reached my shoulder, and in the center of my palm, a small golden eye appeared, throbbing like a heart.
I turned to the guards and priests, who were frozen in terror. I was no longer Attiya the excavator. I had become something that even Death feared.
But the cry that erupted from my depths was a scream of pure terror: 'What have I done?!'"